Does anyone use a version control system with MS Word 2007 files?

I work for a magazine publisher and one of our editorial groups currently uses Word 2003's versioning system for their articles. We are in the process of upgrading to Word 2007 which does not have a versioning system because of the problems it causes with bloated doc files and the possibility for file corruption. I'm investigating alternative solutions for handling version control with Word 2007. As far as I'm concerned it can be a completely different word processing system.

EDIT: To clarify, I should have said a revision control system for the actual Word documents, not for the format of the file. The Track Changes feature is useful until the changes are accepted. This particular group wants to be able to see all revisions of the document. We used to use a client/server content management system, but it was outdated and very expensive to update and maintain. I'm open to suggestions for a publishing CMS.

I'm using Word 2007, but save all my files in 'Word 97- 2003 Document' with no problems. As I have files going back to Word 1.0, that is a handy way of keeping them together. Otherwise 'Open Office' will save or save as in almost any format.

I thought Sharepoint supported versioning for Office files now. Otherwise, there's a commercial product out there that handles versioning. It sucks that MS took that feature out. I used it a lot to write a thesis and book.

I've never done that myself admittedly. No idea how merging would work, I guess that could be kind of a mess / not work at all :/

For everything else I think you'll be fine, we're using it for some *.xls and *.exe files at work, too.

EDIT: I think I misunderstood your question. I'm quite certain you'd have to use 3rd party software to manage the files for the repo. tortoisesvn comes to mind, it is freeware and integrates nicely into the windows explorer.

If you don't care about line by line edits, you can use a normal VCS (svn, git, mercurial) and treat the documents as binary blobs. There will probably be a space penalty, but you can access each revision easily.